Creating Globally Literate Learners

Literacy and Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy

What is literacy?

When asked, many people might define it as the process of learning to read, write, communicate, and understand language in many forms in many contexts.

They might point out important features in literacy instruction that include background knowledge building, text quality and complexity, effective and explicit instruction of literacy skills and strategies, differentiated instruction, and rich discussion and collaboration.

But some literacy researchers and scholars would say this definition is too limited.

In their view, literacy can enable citizens to participate in society, expand their life opportunities, and engage in what is happening in the world around them, while also leading to self-empowerment, self-determination, and self-liberation (Muhammad, 2020).

How, then, can classrooms draw upon this wider definition of literacy, when mandates focus teachers and teaching of literacy on sets of skills and competencies?

What are Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogies (CRSP)?

Drawn from the work on culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012), CRSP can be a basis for all education, including literacy education.

CRSP supports academic achievement of all students, champions cultural competence in diverse perspectives, encourages learning with a critical and socially aware stance, and develops a worldview that values diversity and pluralism.

CRSP enables transformation through meaningful, critical thinking and discussions, as it critiques inequities in school and society (Thornton, 2014).

Given the importance of literacy in the educational development of all students, and the need to better address the diversity and needed pluralism in our country, combining literacy instruction with CRSP plays a crucial role in developing globally literate learners — who are culturally empowered, determined to succeed, think critically, and can use literacy as a tool toward improving society.

Let’s look at different aspects of the overall learning environment to consider ways in which effective literacy instruction combines with tenets from CRSP. Considerations for the classroom community, tasks chosen, content used, assessments of learning, differentiation opportunities, as well as interactions with families all have an impact on how a literacy classroom becomes a space for developing globally literate learners.

The Classroom Community

The classroom community provides avenues for the development of a classroom grounded in collaboration, risk-taking, responsibility, perseverance, and communication. This allows all learners to find a pathway to deep learning and academic success by promoting classroom practices that support meaningful learning and collaboration among peers. Valuing students’ voices on what they think about the world around them, and what they know, allows teachers to build on students’ funds of knowledge and adapt instruction and application opportunities.

• Teach students strategies for engaging in focused academic discussions and collaborative conversations that value the perspectives of others and enhance their individual vocabularies.
• Have students assist each other to understand and interrogate the texts they read to build critical analysis skills needed for navigating today’s data-driven world.
• Encourage deep listening skills in students so they can build knowledge on various topics through interactions with others in the learning community.
• Provide examples and opportunities for students to connect who they are and what they know with what they are learning as they encounter new ideas through the texts they read and the discussions they have.

Authentic and Rigorous Learning Tasks

Authentic and rigorous learning tasks provide multiple opportunities to learn new material and challenging content for all levels of learners. Time to discuss, grapple, and critique ideas, along with space to personally connect to the content allows all students to develop enthusiasm and dedication to their literacy learning.

• Engage students in quality texts that center on relevant issues, examples, and real-world problems.
• Regularly provide students with prompts and questions that encourage them to think, read, and write both critically and analytically.
• Create tasks for students that have multiple entry points so all learners can engage and learn with rigorous content.
• Extend writing tasks to allow students opportunities to make observations and connections, use evidence to support ideas, revise their thinking, and encourage original expression.

Relevant, Respectful, and Meaningful Content

Fill classrooms with relevant, respectful, and meaningful content that represents the lives and experiences of a range of individuals who belong to different racial, ethnic, religious, age, gender, linguistic, socio-economic, and ability groups in equitable, positive, and non-stereotypical ways. Selecting high quality and diversified content allows all learners to see themselves reflected in the content they are learning.

• Integrate content that includes a range of cultural perspectives throughout lessons and units, rather than as a separate lesson or example.
• Support students’ understanding of the ideals of pluralism through tasks connected to diverse literature selections and themes.
• Encourage students to share stories from/about their families and communities as an integral part of the literary texts and tasks used in lessons.
• Review resources to ensure depictions of people from various ethnic backgrounds engaging in a variety of environments, lifestyles, positions of power, and successes/challenges.
• Stock the classroom library shelves with texts from authors who represent a rich range of backgrounds and cultures.

Evidence of Learning

Continuous opportunities to gather evidence of learning provides teachers with information about each learner’s academic progress through a variety of assessment methods. This allows for timely feedback to learners and supports differentiation for meeting the needs of all learners.

• Infuse opportunities for students’ self-evaluation of their own learning and recognition of their progress over time, which is integral to student success. Have students share, through multiple means (writing, dictating, video, audio, etc), how well they understand leaning goals and encourage them to reflect on what may have been difficult to understand.
• Allow students to use their self-assessments to make choices on which literacy activities to choose during independent and collaborative work time. Assign “must do” activities, and allow students, based on their self-assessments and guidance from teacher conferences, to choose other activities to complete.
• Provide consistent opportunities for formative assessment. Use the results of the assessments to inform decisions about teacher-led small group, student learning pathways, and differentiated instruction.

Differentiation Opportunities

Providing instructional pathways through differentiation opportunities will allow teachers to meet the individual needs of all learners, which creates a more equitable learning experience. In CRSP literacy classrooms, differentiation of instruction through flexibility, adaptability, and choice are some of the key principles upon which resources should be selected.

• Provide a variety of opportunities of on-level content for all students using rich, authentic factual and literary texts.
• Integrate scaffolding for both reading and writing — such as chunking texts, shared reading or reviewing and analyzing models — to help students access on-level tasks and push them to new levels of learning without frustration or boredom.
• Based on timely formative assessments, create differentiated small group instruction to provide just-in-time, targeted instruction to support all students in the skills, concepts, and standards taught, such as phonemic awareness, comprehension, writing structures, and reading fluency.
• Include a variety of options for students to practice and extend their knowledge of the skills and standards taught in the text sets and on extended writing projects.

Supporting Family Communication

A crucial aspect of a CRSP literacy classroom is supporting family communication. Create open communication avenues for families through regular and varied interactions that break the traditional one-way communication stream from school to home.

• Communicate goals and essential questions for upcoming units so families have access to the overarching focus of what their child is learning.
• Develop literacy activities that families can complete with students at home that connect what students are learning in school with aspects of home life. Include easy to understand directions in multiple languages.
• Have students create audio summaries of shared reads and anchor texts being used in the classroom that can be shared with families.
• In addition to family nights and newsletters, create opportunities to have virtual events at a variety of times to allow families to join when they have availability. Also, record these events for on-demand viewing.
• Be creative in communicating academic progress with families. In addition to report cards and in-person conferences, messaging, real-time data apps, student-created video newsletters, and shared files are some other ways to keep families up-to-date on their child’s progress and needs.

Our Commitment to Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy

To support the work of educators in advancing equity and meeting the needs of all learners, McGraw Hill’s reading program, Wonders, is designed to teach the whole child.

Wonders supports a culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogical approach by providing instruction that is multimodal and develops all domains of literacy, for all students. Embedded in the instructional routines of Wonders, teachers are provided the support to work with students to build community, collaboration, and mutual respect through collaborative conversations. Wonders focus on differentiation is designed to provide equity of access to content for all learners, ensuring they are active participants in their classroom community, academic discussions, and partner work. A commitment to pluralism and our nation’s diverse population is evident in the literature selections and themes found throughout every grade.

Learn more about our highly-rated Wonders curriculum:

Pre-K-6 Literacy Curriculum | Wonders | McGraw Hill

Conclusion

For our children to be active participants in the world, teaching them to respect and acknowledging the voices of others, and to make sure everyone’s voice and experiences are valued are skills just as important as thinking critically, reading, writing, problem-solving, and experimenting. It is critical to infuse every child’s literacy education with resources and tools to help them become active members of a learning community filled with empathy, understanding, equity, and social action.

References

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating Genius. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Thornton, Natasha A., “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Literacy Instruction, and Teacher Decision Making: A Formative Experiment Investigating Shifts in Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices.” Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2014. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/msit_diss/138

Lanette Trowery, PhD is the Senior Director of the McGraw Hill Learning Research and Strategy Team.

Lanette was in public education for more than 25 years, working as a university professor, site-based mathematics coach, elementary and middle school teacher, mathematics consultant, and a professional learning consultant, before coming to McGraw Hill in 2014. She earned her Master’s, in Educational Administration, and Doctorate, in Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum, from the University of Pennsylvania.

After earning her PhD, Lanette furthered her work in teacher education by becoming a professor in teacher education at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Her next position brought her to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN where she was the director of the Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools Master’s program. As director, Lanette led a team of faculty and coaches, along with school principals and district leadership, in supporting urban middle school teachers through a focus on developing and enhancing the teachers’ pedagogical, content, leadership and advocacy skills. Her research work focused on understanding the impact of culturally relevant pedagogies on teaching practices in mathematics.

Lanette’s team, Learning Research and Strategy, serves as the center of excellence for teaching and learning best practices. They collaborate across teams and with experts and customers to establish guiding principles based on learning science research and lead the efforts to move from theory to practice through a strong learning science foundation for our programs, efficacy research into our products, and professional learning both internally and externally.